Olive Branch

Back at Christmas, we hopped in the car with Sandra and went driving around looking for a Christmas tree. Not such a big thing in Marrakech, and they mostly had a sad Charlie Brown quality to them. Heading out of town on the road to Eureka, we stopped at a nursery, which, while it failed to deliver a Christmas tree taller than three feet, did have some beautiful olive trees. Which got us thinking. Why must we have a fir tree? Couldn’t we decorate an olive tree with lights and call it a Christmas tree?

We’d been wanting a tree for our courtyard for some time, and this seemed a good opportunity to get one. Olive trees are hardy, we’ve been told. They need virtually no water and can be ignored. Since we’re both missing green thumbs – in LA we managed to kill a cactus – this seemed a good option. We pondered an assortment of olive trees for a moment and deciding we could make a go of it, bought a large one and a terra cotta pot. (The terra cotta pot was cheaper than the ugly plastic alternative, quite the opposite of what you would find in the U.S..)
The next day the tree was delivered and installed. We found a string of Christmas lights. They’d been brought in by an American expat and were 110V instead of the local 220V, but we found that if we turned them on for short periods of time they wouldn’t blow out and it was, in its own way, Christmas-y. Put a brother and sister and some presents in front of it, play Handel’s Messiah, squint just so, and it wasn’t a white Christmas, but it was something.



But Christmas was months ago, and with time our hearty tree stopped looking so good. Where once people asked if it would bear fruit, they now asked if it was dying. We moved it from a shady corner to one with more light. Our Baraka birds took to plucking its dead leaves to line their nests. And all the while, the two of us wondered, what have we done wrong? How is this tree dying? We argued about water – after all, very little water is not the same as no water at all. We asked Hamoud, who shook his head at the tree, and brought round a tree man, who took one look at it and declared that our olive tree was sick with some kind of fatal bug. We asked if he could nurse it back to health and he shook his head. He told us that the tree had been sick when we’d bought it, and that a healthy tree would have sprouted several new branches by now.

The news was bad, the news was a blow: our tree must go. But the silver lining to the particular cloud gleamed bright. It wasn’t our fault. We hadn’t killed this tree. Hamoud’s tree man is going to find us a new tree, smaller, perhaps, a more modest thing, but he’s promised it will be disease free. We’ll see how long it lasts.